Wherefore the Love for MetroidVanias?

…I’ve had to contend with an inescapable irony: that, while the handheld format for these games worsened their aesthetic possibilities (whether visual or audio), it also facilitated a sort of experience that’s lost when emulating these games on a computer, or playing them on a TV screen — an experience best represented by a prior expression: “a final bite-sized bit of entertainment under the covers of one’s bed.”

That Unknown Place to Which I Return

Modernity imposes upon dreams a mighty lack of serious representation. Rather than this being attributable to others sharing a comparable personal policy around tenderness, I believe this lack has almost everything to do with the predominant materialist framework we occupy (perpetuated by psychology just as much as anything else), to say nothing of how our daily habits may affect our ability to reliably enter dreams and retain memories of them.

A Modern Myth of Things Set to the Side: UFOs as Cloaking Devices for Worldview Warfare

Situating UFOs as one mechanism within a larger geopolitical machine requires an inquiry into its plurality of applications. […] But no matter the technical sophistication of UFOs, these are activities which would exist with or without the craft. It is arguably in the UFO as an idea where we find some of its most powerful aspects, many of which can mobilize simply through the perpetual cultural transmission of one idea or another.

The Popular Nihilism of "Everything Everywhere All At Once"

Ostensibly against nihilism, the movie wants to be uplifting in sort of contrarian way — yet it presents a situation where nihilism is the only option. Since meaning is nothing more than a sociocultural creation, any meaning-oriented existence is an exercise in cognitively dissonant self-delusion.

PREPARE 2 SIGH: The Music of Dark Souls, etc.

In a very real sense, the soundtracks for the Dark Souls sequels and Elden Ring are little but the audio equivalent of Big Guys with Big Swords — interchangeable, predictable — and even the most enthusiastic comments regarding the persons or beasts they pretend to describe only amplify this by their uniformity: “Once, they were magnificent; now, tragic.” Prepare to Cry.

Space time and the Body of Attention

When certain technologies automatize certain acts and functions, and once those technologies become sufficiently integrated into enough aspects of civilization as to become mundane matters of fact — functionally invisible — I think that we become similarly newly automatized.

Heavenly Purgatories: The Postmodern Labyrinth

In a way, the Backrooms is a collective dark fantasy born out of the industrio-consumerist landscape — a landscape where all sorts of mutilative efficiencies and conveniences, funneling back to an altar for a molochian machine god, have deprived so many of our built realms of aesthetic sensitivity.

The Best of Elden Ring's Level Design

After a couple of years of generally writing only critically negative things about Elden Ring, the time has come, I guess, to highlight some of its virtues. Given my usual emphases, it also felt right for the focus to be on level design.

Passport to Myopia: Silver Saucers, Ivory Towers

Suddenly, the CIA-approved theater going on with UFOs and self-described whistleblowers — most of whom conveniently (and anonymously) reside within the governmental structure — has prompted everyone and anyone to opine in ways not at all commensurate with their apparent level of knowledge, or the matter’s imposingly interdisciplinary nature.

Ugliness Writ Large: Beyond Boston City Hall

…the attempt to find a hard correlation between form and sociocultural effect seems as hopeless as it is reductive. For the specialist, it is an extension of the long-attractive notion that architecture is a language, and each building an essay made up of lexical units. For the layperson, it is a faith in a perennial art which found its highest expression somewhere in a virtuous Past.

Lithic Lacks & Chromatic Apologia (2023)

Today, the word “aesthetic” is often used superficially to distinguish between items as one might with brands. Architect and historian Xing Ruan makes a careful correction regarding this in his recent book, Confucius’ Courtyard: “…we ought to be reminded of the root of aesthetics: ‘aesthesia’ is not just about beauty but connected with sensing — feeling and coming to life. The opposite of being alive is ‘anaesthesia’ — the dulling of the senses.”

The Obfuscating Effect of Contemporary Non-Materialistic Ufology (2023)

…we still have no good working definition for what material itself is. Indeed, the very division into the “material” and the “spiritual” by some non-materialists — the idea, for instance, that the soul is materially transcendent, or insubstantial — ironically maintains the materialist, or Cartesian mind/body, paradigm.

The Spectral Revolution (2023)

…much of what passes for radical politics today, among both Left- and Right-identifying domains, is really the passive consumption of an event which one has had little or nothing to do with, but which can be appropriated according to the most emotionally agitating form of the dialectic.

Strangled and Mangled: Classicism and Its Ersatz After Architecture’s Commodification (2022)

It is not difficult, when treading the relatively casual discursive spheres of architectural observation and criticism, to find many instances of designs for élite clientele being mocked for formal ugliness, stylistic ignorance, and architectonic ineptitude. Many of these designs have pretensions of classicism (that is, of the Greco-Roman variety), meaning that such criticism can draw from well-established stylistic rules or suggestions. What is rarer to find is an equivalent scrutiny regarding common architecture.

A Phenomenology of Gazes || Nope (2022)

“Nope” is almost aggressively defined by gazes. Anyone who has seen it will remember Daniel Kaluuya’s character, OJ, not so much deducing as intuiting, within a life-or-death scenario, that the movie’s flying saucer — really, more of an Unidentified Feeding Object — consumes anything which grants (or appears to grant, as the movie’s climax demonstrates) it attention.

Formalism, Dreams, Souls (2020)

Like the language of dreams, the visual and textual constructions of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 are cyphers, cryptograms. Also like dreams, even once we have located embedded archetypal narratives, their varied mutability preserves a fundamental mystery, compelling further interpretations and producing abundant layers of cross-referential and cross-cultural significance.

Economy and Thematic Structure: Symphony of the Night's Level Design (2015)

"Why is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night good?" is a question that's been asked countless times over the years since the game's release on the PlayStation in 1997. People seem almost desperate to know the answer to this in the wake of similarly modeled but less acclaimed titles such as Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia.

Aldrich and the Desacralization of Dark Souls 3 (2020)

Aldrich, the obsessive-consumptive cannibal saint, is one of Dark Souls 3′s most interesting figures when one sees his actions and inferred character as representing a prominent facet of humanity’s spiritual position at the time of the game’s setting. If we look at Dark Souls 3′s landscape as an assemblage of symbolics, and compare it to Dark Souls’ arrangement, we see that an inversion has occurred…

Size and Sensibility || Elden Ring (2022)

With a game like Demon’s Souls or Sekiro, the world conformed to some association between your lone person and what might be interpreted as engaging, multiform level design. Most of Elden Ring, however, is an overworld where the greatest guiding principle was making the size large enough so that traversing it by horse didn’t trivialize the sense of scope.

PREPARE 2 SIGH || The Music of Dark Souls (2019)

The Dark Souls series’ soundtracks are, collectively, one of the largest recent aesthetic offenses perpetuated in videogames. To contrast their unimaginativeness with the rest of the games’ material, it’s hard to not feel a dulled sensation nearing depression, as if a bright gray sky, overcast yet with no distinction of clouds’ forms, had settled upon one’s mind.